In gas turbine engines, such as aircraft engines, air is drawn into the front of the engine, compressed by a shaft-mounted compressor, and mixed with fuel in a combustor. The mixture is then burned and the hot exhaust gases are passed through a turbine mounted on the same shaft. The flow of combustion gas expands through the turbine which in turn spins the shaft and provides power to the compressor. The hot exhaust gases are further expanded through nozzles at the back of the engine, generating powerful thrust, which drives the aircraft forward.
Because engines operate in a variety of conditions, foreign objects may undesirably enter the engine. More specifically, foreign objects, such as large birds, hailstones, ice, sand and rain may be entrained in the inlet of the engine where they may impact the engine or a fan blade therein. Sometimes these impacts can result in a portion of the contacted blade being torn loose from the rotor, which is commonly known as fan blade out. The loose fan blade may then impact the interior of the fan casing. Similarly, in cold weather and at high altitudes, ice can form and accumulate on the fan blades. When engine speed is rapidly accelerated, or altitude is decreased, the ice can shed, also resulting in an impact with the interior of the fan casing.
In recent years composite materials have become increasingly popular for use in a variety of aerospace applications because of their durability and relative lightweight. Although composite materials can provide superior strength and weight properties, and can lessen the extent of damage to the fan casing during impacts such as ice shedding and fan blade outs, there remains room for improvement.
Current composite containment technology, such as that used to make fan casings, typically employs a thick, monolithic hardwall design that is capable of withstanding an impact caused by ice and/or released fan blades, and also fragmentizing the ice or released fan blades, breaking them into smaller pieces. These fragmentized pieces can then be purged from the engine without causing significant damage to either the engine or the body of the aircraft. The construction of the fan casing provides for the dissipation of impact energy using any of a number of mechanisms including fiber/matrix interference failure, matrix microcracking and ply delamination.
More specifically, current hardwall designs generally consist of an abradable system having an abradable layer attached to a substrate structure that includes a glass/epoxy composite face sheet bonded to a Nomex® honeycomb core, which can be very lightweight. See U.S. Pat. No. 5,344,280 to Langenbrunner et al. However, such honeycomb cores are typically not designed to provide significant energy absorption during a fan blade out event. More specifically, the design of the honeycomb core results in an abradable system having radial weakness. Thus, released fan blades will have a tendency to simply cut through the honeycomb core upon impact, leaving roughly 99% of the impact energy to be absorbed by the fan casing body. Moreover, because the current abradable systems require numerous layup, bonding, cure, and machining cycles, the fabrication of such systems can be labor intensive, costly, and can result in a heavier than desired fan casing because of the multiple layers of construction. Additionally, because the abradable system is fabricated separately from, and then attached to, the fan casing, the two parts function independently, rather than as a unitary system.
Moreover, even if the current composite fan casing design successfully absorbs the impact of the released fan blade and shatters the released blade into smaller fragments as intended, there can still be issues. In particular, as the fan blade fragments are thrown about inside of the fan casing, they can move with such force that there is potential for the fragments to be forcefully thrown from the engine through the inlet. Once ejected from the engine, there is a risk that the blade fragments could be thrown toward the passenger compartment or other key aircraft components, causing severe damage.
Accordingly, there remains a need for composite containment casings having a mechanism for capturing released fan blade fragments to significantly reduce the likelihood of severe damage to the aircraft resulting from the impact thereof.